


The Mystery of Love

by ObliObla



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Banter, Guilt, Hell, Identity Reveal, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Pre-Canon, Smoking, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 17:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18899764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: Oscar Wilde meets a stranger in a den of iniquity to discuss the nature of sin and guilt. Things don't work out for the best, but when have they ever?For Lucifer Bingo prompt: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions





	The Mystery of Love

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to [Arlome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arlome/pseuds/Arlome), [Maimat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maimat/pseuds/Maimat), and [TheYahwehDance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheYahwehDance/pseuds/TheYahwehDance) for your invaluable beta help!

 “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”—Salome, Oscar Wilde

* * *

The smoke hung heavy in the room darkened over by shawls and curtains. Men lay on low couches, taking their drugged pleasure together, but remaining, ultimately, separate.

“But what of the duality of man?” Oscar asked. He had seen a man lounging in an even more shadowy corner, stretched out to a length as absurd as his own height. There was something striking about him and, when their eyes met, the man had smiled invitingly. Oscar had been ever so bored; he had found himself unsuited to marriage, though he loved his wife dearly, and was searching for something with more substance than London society could offer.

And now they spoke of philosophy, smoking idly from a nearby hookah, with all the cultivated idleness of the Greeks or the more luxurious Romans. He shook himself from his haze to finish his thought. “There is a mote of evil, yes, but surely there is also a spark of good?”

The stranger merely hummed.

“Do we not have souls? Is there no light in us?”

The man steepled his fingers together, leaning back with a casual, feline air. “Why do you humans always assume that light is good?”

This strangely alien air was something he had already noted, that metropolitan society rarely saw itself as a part of humanity. “God saw the light, that it was good,” Oscar quoted.

The man chuckled quietly. “Why do you assume that He would know?”

“And why do _you_ assume He wouldn’t?”

“My _friend_ …” he said in a nearly threatening voice, though Oscar only found it thrilling. “You ask impertinent questions.”

“Only good questions deserve good answers, but… it _is_ a good question, is it not?”

The man grumbled a little. “Is this all you aspire to? To contemplate the good?”

“Perhaps.”

“And perhaps that will be the end of you.”

Oscar smirked. “What is it that Euripides said? περινοεῖν ἅπαντα? Question everything?”

The man laughed, high and clear. “Or the words Aristophanes put in his mouth, at least,” he said, shaking his head. “But fine, then. People do not, after all, arrive broken, so… What would _you_ say shatters their spirit and wrecks their countenance?”

“Sin,” Oscar said, but there was no faith in it.

“Ah, and do you always believe what your church tells you?”

Oscar frowned.

“Come, now. What causes man to fall if not those nasty little desires to take and harm and ravage?”

And the thought appeared in his mind, fully formed, obvious and inexorable. “Guilt.”

They sat in silence for a moment before the man leant forward, losing his nonchalance. A little sincerity seemed a dangerous thing when it lay upon _his_ face. “Indeed. Guilt, not sin, is the mark of your judgement.” His voice softened. “And I can see that you are not unacquainted with the bastard child of expectation, are you?”

“No…” Images flitted across Oscar’s mind: his sister, taken far too young; his wife, full with all his love for her, but none of his affections; the young men at the dinner clubs who he turned away from lest he… “Must I lose my soul’s inheritance?” he asked weakly. He didn’t know why he was pleading for absolution from a stranger in an opium den, but the man seemed willing to offer it.

“You are a consummate individual,” he said softly, indicating the flamboyancy of his clothing, seeming to envelop the entirety of his manner and his aspect. “We find ourselves in the native land of the hypocrite, but you must not adopt its common tongue. You must be entirely and absolutely yourself, in all things.”

“But how can I not lie when I am…?” But Oscar couldn’t let the word pass his lips.

“To speak the truth is a painful thing, but to be forced to tell lies is far worse.” The stranger’s gentle grin became a leer. “Tell me, what do you desire more than anything else in life?”

There was a buzzing in Oscar’s ears and his head was filled with cotton. Voices and smoke and the silk beneath his fingers fell away and there was only the man. Only his sly smile and the beauty of his lineaments, so like the Greek marbles, so cleanly and finely sculpted, as if by the very hand of God. “I… I don’t…”

“Oh… you’re a complicated one, I see.” Something in the depths of his dark eyes flickered and the tide withdrew in Oscar’s mind, washing away his reluctance. “Out with it, then.”

“I want… I want to be a great man, and I want recognition for my greatness.”

The stranger nodded. “Yes, I see the truth in that, but… there _is_ something else, isn’t there? Something you are not so proud of, I think.”

“I… I want…”

“Yes?”

“I want to kiss you with the kisses of my mouth for your love is better than wine.” Oscar fell back, face burning with shame. He cursed his weakness and didn’t realize he had spoken out loud until his tempter spoke again.

“Do you really think it weakness that yields to temptation? Darling, there are terrible temptations that require strength and courage both to yield to.”

He stared at the stranger blankly for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a man like you.”

The man laughed again, warm and inviting. “I assure you, you have not.”

“Who _are_ you?”

“A libertine, a decadent, an aesthete…” He winked. “A deviant.”

“You admit it freely?”

“Why ever not?

“But the law—?”

“Mortal laws are made by venal men.”

“And canon law?”

He grinned. “The most venal of the lot.”

Oscar blinked. “W-what should I do?”

The man slipped forward, serpentine, to whisper in his ear. “What do you _want_ to do?”

He was so close Oscar breathed him in with each inhale, fire and honey and spice on his palate. The velvet and silk of his vestments brushed Oscar’s chest as the man waited, their noses an inch apart, his gaze drawing him forward. “I want to kiss you.”

The beautiful stranger’s voice was barely more than a gentle rumble that shot down Oscar’s spine. “Then take what you want.”

And his love was indeed better than wine.

* * *

“Are you a good man or a bad one?” Splayed out on silk sheets, sweat sticking him to the fabric, Oscar found himself comfortable in his discomfort. The cab ride to these secret rooms had passed in a blur of desire and barely preserved propriety.

His bedmate stretched over him to withdraw a cigarette from a silver case and light it. “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” He breathed in a lungful of smoke and offered the cigarette to Oscar. “And I, of course, am the most charming of all.”

He took it and, even now, sated and satiated, a frisson of pleasure shot through him when his fingers brushed the other’s finely manicured hand. There was a ring on his finger, one that ought to have been ugly, but it was difficult to find any flaw with this stranger in his stranger’s bed. He exhaled roughly, passing back the cigarette. “A saint or a sinner?” The guilt he had expected had not yet come and he was anxious for it to arrive in a timely manner.

The man laughed a laugh as splendorous as he was. It was lower and less performative and it warmed Oscar from his toes. “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

“And you?”

“I have neither.” He grinned but there was sorrow there, and grief, and pain.

As he lay back, more statue now than man in his queer stillness, words appeared to Oscar as if from the aether.

> Lift up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions where one sinks!
> 
> Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx! and sing me all your memories!

He studied him for a moment longer. “You are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

The stranger tipped his head back and to the side to watch him; his hair was untamed now, lost to artfully disheveled curls and he reminded Oscar of nothing so much as a Renaissance painting of a saint. “Thank you,” he said softly and made to move away.

Oscar caught at his wrist carefully. “Spirit of beauty, tarry with me awhile?”

This resplendency made flesh, this angel made _man_ took another drag from the cigarette before stubbing it out and rolling closer, silk slipping from his hips. “Do not beg, darling. It does not become you.”

“It is safer to beg than to take.”

“But it is finer to take than to beg.” He slipped back over Oscar and leant down to whisper in his ear. “Truly, you needn’t do either, for what I offer is freely given.”

Oscar tried to steady his hand as he trailed his fingertips down cheek and neck and chest. “You are of eucharis, that morning star which does not dread the sun, which but to kiss would make Adonis jealous.”

“Oh, you _do_ know me then?”

He didn’t comprehend the meaning, but the thought left his mind when soft, warm lips met his again.

* * *

The night had been a fairy story, but the shameful day was fast approaching and Oscar dressed himself quickly, though the stranger seemed entirely willing to luxuriate still further in his sloth and his gluttony and his pride.

As the morning began to cross the sky, so too did guilt rear its great, ponderous head and breathe its fetid doubt over his mind. “Are we all bad?” he whispered to himself. “Or are we good?”

It was surely much too quiet to hear even in the silence, but the man responded regardless. “We are, all of us, in the gutter.” And he rose from the bed, still wrapped in silks and anointed with moonlight. “But some of us are looking at the stars.” And there were stars in his eyes when they kissed with a kiss that tasted like truth, and wickedness, and hope.

“Mark what I said, love,” the stranger murmured softly against his cheek. “There is no land for guilt to conquer in a life conducted with absolute authenticity.”

Oscar shook his head. “A man who does not think for himself does not think at all?”

And the man smiled with all the light of the dawn. “And pleasure, of course, is the only thing one should live for. Pleasure and sweeter temptation.”

“I can resist everything except temptation,” Oscar replied, and turned away, lest he be swept up again in the maelstrom and the current.

The man chuckled and there was the sound of a match being struck, of smoke being coaxed from another cigarette. “Your temperance is noble, but you must remember, darling, to always take your virtues with a chaser of sin”

Oscar looked back at him for a moment before pulling open the door; it was an Orphean error, perhaps, but there was a question in his mind that demanded answer, one that ought, he felt, to have occurred to him earlier. “What is your name?”

“Another of your impudent questions,” the errant stranger said, but the smile that spread across his face was of flame and sin and the pale blooms of death. “Yet even so I will tell you what you ask. I have many names, but you may call me Hesperus, the lord of will and, should we ever meet again, you would do well to recall it.”

The door latched behind him with the fatal note of a closing coffin lid and Oscar breathed a sigh of relief even as a pang of loss shot through his chest. If this man was the evening star, what dread night awaited him?

* * *

“De profundis clamavi ad te Domine < _from the depths I have cried to you, O Lord > _ ,” Oscar recited, knelt on the stone of the prison floor. It was uncomfortable but he held the position, welcoming the pain as penance. “Domine exaudi vocem meam— < _Lord, hear my voice_ >”

“Non sum tuum Dominum < _I am not your Lord_ >,” called a voice from out of the darkness. A man appeared before him—that dark stranger who had so led him astray. “Sed ego exaudiam tuam deprecationem < _But I will hear your supplication_ >.” He smirked and Oscar leapt to his feet and lunged, only to meet air and the sharp edge of his bed.

He turned back to the impossible man, steadying himself. “You cannot be here.”

“Can’t I?” he asked, and his eyes burned with fire.

“No… no, no, no…”

“You know me,” the man said with a voice that trembled in the ears like a shock upon the earth. “You’ve always known me.”

“A spirit, a _phantom_.”

“I have many names, do you recall the one I bade you remember?”

_Hesperus, the star of evening. But Venus in its other aspect was called…_

“And what epithets you have called me? Lord Wotton, of course. Lord Darlington, perhaps? Illingworth, Goring, always lords…” He smiled with too many teeth. “But, of course, I _am_ a lord, so it is only fitting.”

“A lie!”

The walls shook. A shout came up from some adjacent cell, but a terrible silence settled over the room and the dread chill of prison stone gave way to torridity. Flesh stripped away from the man and his voice was of flame and fatal inexorability. “Never a lie,” he hissed. But then he stopped, adjusted his cufflinks, and his mortal guise returned. “Let us speak plainly, call things as they are.”

“Devil,” Oscar said, with more bravery than he felt. “Satan. Deceiver.” He was muttering almost wildly now but he couldn’t stop himself. “Prince of darkness, lord of Hell… Phosphor… or Lucifer, the shining one. You tempted me and I fell to sin—”

“No, no, _no_ ,” the lord of the underworld said silkily. “Don’t you remember your own words, my dear? You are your own devils and _you_ make your world Hell.”

“H-have you come to hurt me?” Oscar asked hoarsely. “I have nothing left.”

“You have much left, Oscar, but do not fret. I am not here to take or harm or ravage.”

“Then to tempt me again?” Perhaps he was as Christ in the desert. _Man does not live on bread alone_ , came to his lips, but he _did_ live solely on bread. Bread extended with dust and ash and solitude.

“I told you I would hear your supplication, and I shall.”

Oscar fell back to his knees; perhaps this Satan truly _was_ an angel of light, not simply masquerading as one. “Forgive me, for I have sinned—”

“What is this of sin? Do you not remember what I told you?”

He did remember; even through the opium haze, that conversation had been unique in his life. “Guilt is the mark of my judgement, and…” He looked up at this Devil, at this man. “Guilt will drag my soul down to hell.”

“If you let it.” That unknowable voice had returned to its nonthreatening softness. “You must not ask for forgiveness, for you’ve done nothing to deserve perdition.”

“I have done wrong.”

“Yes.”

“I have been prideful.”

“Of the sort that goeth before a fall, even.”

“But then, why—?”

“My dear man, do you _really_ think all offenses are deserving of the same punishment?” The prince of this world shook his head and pulled the chair from the writing desk, settling into its plain, straight-backed rigidity like the most luxurious throne. He crossed his legs and seemed to sink into his thoughts.

Oscar’s knees hurt. He let himself slip sideways onto the hard floor. He took a breath and something occurred to him. “Why do you care?”

“Oh… because humanity says I’m evil? I thought the things people say of a man do not alter him?” he mocked softly.

“He… he is what he is.”

“Indeed.”

“And truth in religion being the opinions that survived…?”

“Quite.”

“Then… what _are_ you?”

He spread his arms wide. “I am as I said I was the first time we met. I tell only the truth”—he flashed his teeth—“pure, and simple.”

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

And the Devil laughed.

Oscar fell back against the wall. “So the gods _are_ strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us as much as for what is evil and perverse.”

“You punish yourselves. I am merely the jailer. Well…” He chuckled at his own private joke. “Primarily.”

“And so I must accept the fact that I will be punished for the good as well as for the evil?”

“What you must _accept_ is that the scales are weighted. The draught of death is bitter and there is no mercy mixed to temper it.” This angel, made man by the roughness of the walls and the desolation of the air, sighed. “This place will kill you, you know.”

“It is only two years.”

“Even still.”

“I suppose all sentences _are_ sentences of death.”

The Devil turned to him. “You mustn’t feel guilt. You _mustn’t_. I…” He cleared his throat. “I’d rather never see you again.” It was an odd sentiment for a statement made so tenderly.

Oscar considered. “I… I feel the weight of my years too ponderously. Sin may not send me down, but I have played her odds too many times to come away with a winning hand.”

He seemed to debate with himself for a moment. “You have faith, I believe, in my errant half-brother?”

“Is… Is he…?”

“Keep your faith.”

It wasn’t an answer but was, Oscar decided, the best he was likely to receive. “Will it be enough?” he asked, uncertain if he wanted that knowledge.

“I do not lie.”

“ _Will it be enough_?” he repeated.

“You have been a great man, Oscar Wilde. And men will know your greatness.” He hesitated, voice lowering. “If nothing else… your desires have been fulfilled.”

Oscar slumped back against the wall and leant his head against its roughness. “Well, I suppose that is all I may hope for in this life.”

“No,” the Devil whispered, turning away. “It isn’t.”

* * *

> And alien tears will fill for him
> 
> Pity's long-broken urn,
> 
> For his mourner will be outcast men,
> 
> And outcasts always mourn.

The epitaph was engraved in the stone beneath the great sphinx, that stately creature poised to guard the tomb. Lucifer ran his hand down its carved tresses and over the letters. He leaned his forehead into its great crest and caressed its broad haunches. And there, in the holy night, from where he stood in the gutter, with the stars as his most sacred witnesses, he kissed the stone lips with the kisses of his mouth and touched his fingertips to its carefully hewn feathers.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered in the darkness as he let his own wings manifest and reach out to the Sphinx’s, leaving a mark of grace where they had touched—an unexplainable desire to meet this stone with all the tenderness in one’s soul, and to bury that mote of darkness in a spark of light. Though he, even with all his power, had not the sway to save a single human soul from the endless fires of perdition.

“‘To live is the rarest thing in the world’, but _you_ lived, Oscar. Even Hell can’t take that from you.” He turned away, head tilted down against the glory of the heavens.

And he did not look back.

* * *

There is a door buried deep in the labyrinth of hell, wrought in ivory, and within it there is a small cell, reminiscent of a late Victorian prison. And there is a man there who writes all alone, with letters he cannot read, in ink he draws from his own blood. He writes his sins on never ending parchment and the incomprehensible words bind themselves to his flesh. And he will write until the trumpets of judgement day sound, all alone in that little cell, behind that ivory door the Devil refuses to look upon.

This Devil is the jailer and yet he cannot set free a man who does not deserve such punishment. For he must fulfill his purpose, and he is not the judge. He is the sword but he is not the hand wielding it, though _his_ hands are the ones that run red with the blood of the fallen.

> And all men kill the thing they love,
> 
> By all let this be heard,
> 
> Some do it with a bitter look,
> 
> Some with a flattering word,
> 
> The coward does it with a kiss,
> 
> The brave man with a sword!


End file.
